In the wee hours of this could-have-been glorious morn, you took to less-than-petty theft. Granted, it was not my bicycle that was the subject of the theft, but I am nonetheless affected. "How?" you ask. Allow me to explain the rather simple concept of cause-and-effect.

When you steal a man's bicycle, you deprive him of his primary mode of transportation. When you rob a man of transportation, he becomes home-bound. When a man becomes home-bound, especially a rare and good man, he is without the opportunity to direct the spiritual affairs of another. When the other does not have his spiritual affairs directed, he tends to consider his neighbor less, tends to become self-centered and feckless. A feckless man is of no use to his community, and such a man in his fecklessness might distance himself from development efforts, from local church activities, from sharing the good news of grace with those around him. A man who fails to share the good news of grace might, perhaps, pass an ordinary feller (even a bicycle thief) on the street without a second thought. The ordinary feller, perhaps you, might be searching for the silver-lining to this one unfortunate life. However, without this good news, you go about your way, still in misery, still searching.

Less-than-petty theft has robbed you of the grandest opportunity, see.

Have you considered it? Ah... yes! There's the lightbulb! It seemed a simple bicycle theft; yes? But in the act of stealing from another, you no doubt now realize that you have stolen from yourself. [tweetherder text= "The sins of our own hands have a way of paying themselves forward until... they come back."]The sins of our own hands have a way of paying themselves forward until, in circuitous fashion, they come back to us.[/tweetherder]